Informatics education: beyond the opposition between information technology and computer science

Some researchers and educators complain that, in many countries, informatics teaching relies on using computers in classroom rather than learning computer science theory (see for example ISSEP 2010 Proceedings). According to them, “Information Technology education has replaced Computer Science education”. More deeply, for many authors, concerning what we could call informatics education, a clear opposition has to be done between Information Technology and Computer Science: Information Technology deals with the use of computer and its applications, and Computer Science with the design of informatics products (or more theoretical objects). This is often connected to another opposition between users and designers with the underlying idea that designers are „those who know‟ and users are „those who don‟t need to know‟. In this paper, we argue that we need to go beyond this dichotomy. First of all, we demonstrate that the opposition between designers and users is not relevant in many cases: end-user programming, human decisions involved in complex interaction loops with computers... Furthermore, we think that the opposition based on this dichotomy is not desirable in educational terms: a citizen is more than a simple user. The goal of education for students is not only to acquire computer literacy, but also to gain computer fluency and expertise. We will extend the debate beyond educational issues, claiming that informatics as a scientific field cannot be reduced to computer science, and has to include some human and social issues.